Bicycling Newsletters

We were GPSing home from our daughters' soccer game five or six counties away, so neither of us knew the road except by that primal recognition cyclists experience upon finding an exceptional route: We belonged here. Irish Creek lifted and fell and turned on itself and scrambled away, each reprise different yet never breaking rhythm.

A crosswind was coming so hard and so swirly from our right that a draft was near impossible to find, and even more difficult to stay in. I eventually finagled our exits from the turns to put Joel consistently windward, where, if I let him half-wheel me, I could sit off his front hub in a pocket of less turbulent air. This was all I had: the guile of experience.

Though just a Cat 5 in his first real year of racing, Joel was stronger than me not by degrees but by exponents. A longtime runner and mountain biker who had worked out hard over the winter and kept his momentum through spring, he was taller and lighter than me. And he was tough: He'd missed a season to fly a copter in Iraq. Enthralled by and in thrall to the pull of Irish Creek Road, he was riding in a way that was visibly forceful, though just as visibly raw. His head bobbed and his shoulders swayed as he pedaled. Something about his leg extension was not yet natural. A continual resettling on the saddle signaled a kind of ongoing experimention on a muscular level--his body working through the frustration of not being able to get its power fully out onto the pavement.

In comparison, though these days I am still chasing down the cyclist I used to be, my shadow was riding calm beside me, as if disinterested in the distress of the body that cast it. My feet canted through each pedal stroke in angles two decades in the making even if now grown a little sloppy. I still possessed the ability to ride elbows bent, even in the worst pounding of the crosswind, and when I went to the drops my forearms lay flat, producing a classic position that left not quite 2 inches gap between my knees and arms at the top of a stroke. But flab stretched the dark aubergine of my jersey into a disturbing pastel. Snot streamed from my nose. In my throat, chunks of mucous wriggled upward until I hacked them into my mouth and spat them away. No doubt about it: I was cracking.

In sentence fragments broken apart by breaths I asked questions to elicit his anecdotes, and I put him in the wind and rode the smoothest lines through the corners and shifted to the best gear for keeping momentum on each roller. Sometimes I could slide rearward on the saddle and flatten my back, and drape my hands over the brake hoods and drop my chin and, for a few moments, feel what I should have been able to do--what I once could do and hoped to someday be able to again. My bike would glide forward, and my feet would feel more spun than spinning, and it was only then that I really rode my bike. In a few seconds there would be mucous to hack, and pain to obey, and I would slow and fall back in line with Joel and look over at him without raising my head. And he would be unchanged.